MiniMax M1 model claims Chinese LLM crown from DeepSeek - plus it's true open-source

MiniMax, an AI firm based in Shanghai, has released an open-source reasoning model that challenges Chinese rival DeepSeek and US-based Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google in terms of performance and cost.

MiniMax-M1 was released Monday under an Apache software license, and thus is actually open source, unlike Meta's Llama family, offered under a community license that's not open source, and DeepSeek, which is only partially under an open-source license.

"In complex, productivity-oriented scenarios, M1's capabilities are top-tier among open-source models, surpassing domestic closed-source models and approaching the leading overseas models, all while offering the industry's best cost-effectiveness," MiniMax boasts in a blog post.

According to the blog post, M1 is competitive with OpenAI o3, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Claude 4 Opus, DeepSeek R1, DeepSeek R1-0528, and Qwen3-235B on various benchmarks (AIME 2024, LiveCodeBench, SWE-bench Verified, Tau-bench, and MRCR), coming in behind some models and ahead of others ...